He starts singing. “‘Half my life is over, oh yeah. Half my life has passed me by.’” I roll my eyes, but he keeps going. It’s a bluesy tune and I’m trying to place it. Etta James? B. B. King?“ ‘I wish I could go back, change the past. Have more years, to get it right . . .’”
~ Lori Gottlieb, from her new book titled Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed. Chosen as one of Amazon’s top 10 Books of the Month for April 2019.
I’d made the appointment hoping to get advice on how I might help him. After giving me advice, the therapist, a kind, smart and soft-spoken man by the name of Jeff Pollard, asked simply, “And how are you feeling these days?” I felt my body go utterly still for the count of one, two, three . . .
~ Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country
Photo Credit
Monday.
Me.
Tuesday.
Me.
Wednesday.
Me.
Thursday.
Me.
Friday.
~ Witold Gombrowicz, in the opening of Diary. Just before the outbreak of World War II, young Witold Gombrowicz left his home in Poland and set sail for South America. In 1953, still living as an expatriate in Argentina, he began his Diary with one of literature’s most memorable openings.
Notes: Quote – Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels. Photo: via seemore
For the rest of the week, I became acutely aware of the bizarre phone habits I’d developed. I noticed that I reach for my phone every time I brush my teeth or step outside the front door of my apartment building, and that, for some pathological reason, I always check my email during the three-second window between when I insert my credit card into a chip reader at a store and when the card is accepted.
Mostly, I became aware of how profoundly uncomfortable I am with stillness. For years, I’ve used my phone every time I’ve had a spare moment in an elevator or a boring meeting. I listen to podcasts and write emails on the subway. I watch YouTube videos while folding laundry. I even use an app to pretend to meditate.
If I was going to repair my brain, I needed to practice doing nothing…
It’s an unnerving sensation, being alone with your thoughts.
~ Kevin Roose, from “Do Not Disturb: How I Ditched My Phone and Unbroke My Brain” in The New York Times, February 23, 2019
Photo: Smartphone by Fernando Assumpcao
Tuesday morning.
Early morning traffic is frictionless, commuters float down I-95 S.
It’s 42° F. It’s January. Soft, light rain. Electronics somehow (?) sense that the windshield is damp, wipers flap intermittently. Miracle. All of it.
It’s quiet in the cabin.
No radio.
No talk shows.
No podcasts.
No playlists.
The soft hum of the engine. The shifting of the sole of my right shoe on the accelerator.
And, those pernicious bumpin’ Thoughts. [Read more…]
Where do they come from, thoughts?
Like wrens, out of the sky.
They arrive.
Noisy, hungry, perfectly themselves.
— Peter Behrens, from The Law of Dreams: A Novel
Notes:
I’m medicated. Two doses of NyQuil overnight, followed by a single dose of DayQuil. Smooth gel tablets roll in my palms. Floating. Is this Nepo’s half-wakeful state? Is this place the other name for Heaven?
Thursday. 7:30 am. Late jump. Traffic is flowing smoothly.
Head cold, congestion, body aches. Mucus draining in throat. What’s that smell of rot? Breath sweeter than a Honey Badger.
Day 3, no relief on horizon.
I tried to bow out of this speaking engagement earlier, you know, with that excuse of an important client meeting that conflicts on your calendar. Just couldn’t do it.
And to cancel now? At the last minute? Don’t feel well. Have the flu. Sorry. And leave them hanging with an empty 30 minute slot in a full day event planned months earlier. No, no, no. A burden too heavy to carry.
So, I begged down the engagement and they agreed. I’ll take 30 minutes of Q&A “on any topic.” [Read more…]
“I like things I can see as much as things I can’t (see)…that inner light was drawing me in.”
It was an innocuous line by Murakami in Killing Commendatore, but for some reason I couldn’t, I can’t, let it go.
And then it’s Baader-Meinhof. You are shopping for a new car, you fall in love with a particular model, and then suddenly you begin to see it everywhere. But the what is what I can’t see.
Murakami is followed by a passage I read by Immanuel Kant:
“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.”
And it’s early Saturday morning. Light rain.
I’m in bed, it’s dark out. The body is spent from the week. The Mind is off on its own, its finger tips touching, exploring, wandering, free, weightless. [Read more…]
Jon Wertheim: You use the word “thought spiral.” What does that mean?
John Green: The thing about a spiral is that it– it goes on forever, right? Like, if you zoom in on the spiral it can keep tightening forever. And that for me is the nature of obsessive thought that it’s this inwardly turning spiral that never actually has an end point. So it might be I’m eating a salad and it suddenly occurs to me that somebody might have bled into this salad. Now, they probably didn’t.
Jon Wertheim: This is what you’re thinking?
John Green: But this is what I’m thinking. And instead of being able to move on to a second thought, that thought just expands and expands and expands and expands. And then, I use compulsive behaviors to try to manage the worry and the overwhelmedness that that thought causes me.
~ John Green, 41, in a Sixty Minutes interview on October 7, 2018. “Reaching young adults and dealing with mental illness. The best-selling author of books like ‘The Fault in Our Stars,’ opens up to 60 Minutes about exploring his fears through his writing.”
His fourth solo novel, The Fault in Our Stars, debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list in January 2012 and was a best seller for three years. His most recent book, “Turtles All the Way Down,” has been a best-seller for 50 straight weeks since it debuted at number one. Its theme: obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD, based on Green’s own. For this book, he obeyed that time honored rule of the craft: write what you know.
John Green has:
Photo: John Green via Parade
the hour sinking into the emptiness of my
closed eyes
— Alejandra Pizarnik, from “the hour sinking,” The Galloping Hour: French Poems
Notes:
